Time Flies is a short meditation on the meaning of life

I didn’t expect a brief game about flies to make me emotional. But when I finished Time Flies, I nearly began to cry.

Time Flies initially seems very silly. You play as a little buzzing fly that has to try and accomplish a bucket list of tasks before it, well, kicks the bucket, something that happens in a matter of seconds. The tasks are vague, with titles like “Just Roll with It” or “Meet Your Biggest Fan,” and the goal of the game is to zip around each level, generally cause mischief to complete the tasks, and finish an entire stage’s bucket list to move on to the next one. (Naturally, the last task of each list involves dying in some way.)

The task titles are usually a joke or a pun of some kind, and a lot of the fun is finding objects around the levels and messing with them to see if they fit. Unrolling an entire roll of toilet paper completes the “Just Roll with It” task. You “Meet Your Biggest Fan” by turning on a fan.

When you’re flying around from place to place, things stay zoomed out and the fly is just a tiny speck. When you approach something of some significance, though, the game will zoom in so that you can more easily hop on that roll of toilet paper or grab the fan’s chain. The tighter perspectives are also generally a clue that you’re interacting with something that’s part of your list of goals.

One quirky part of the Time Flies: you choose how long your life is by selecting what country you’re in. Based on World Health Organization (WHO) data, the game translates real information about life expectancy into seconds to determine the life of your little fly. Picking the US gave me a life expectancy of 76.4 seconds, but I usually said I was in Japan, which gave me a comparatively lengthy 84.5 seconds. Because the runs are so short, every second counts — though there is a clever way to give yourself a few more seconds to explore the levels.

Once I got the hang of things, I found myself zipping through the game’s four stages to figure out the bucket list tasks and eventually string them all together, and I finished it after a couple hours. As the game went on, I felt that some of the tasks got a bit more sincere, even if the activities to accomplish them were still quite silly. Don’t we all aspire to “Bring People Together” (push one bust toward another with a wheelchair to make them kiss), “Spend Time with Family” (sit on a floating pile of garbage with other flies), and “Reflect on Your Life” (fly into an upside-down mirror world)?

Maybe it’s because I’m a new dad and I’m just a little bit softer now. But when I showed my wife the whole game — which, if you know what you’re doing, you can do in just a few minutes — we were both choked up on the couch. Even a little fly can have a big life.

^{Time Flies is now available on Nintendo Switch, PC, and PlayStation.}